This shameless mockery was allowed to go unpunished. My mind strove to picture Aunt Jael coping with a like impertinence. I imagined the black wrath, the awful hand upon my shoulder. With what new weapon would she scourge me? Scorpions, perhaps, if obtainable.
During our mental arithmetic lesson, the advanced students at the other end of the room were receiving combined instruction from the deputy-principal in crochet-work and carikter-formation. Miss Salvation was shouting technical advice of the stitch, slip, three treble, four chain, and draw-through-the-first-loop-on-the-hook order, together with more general instructions how to earn the joys of heaven and eschew the fires of hell.
After a while the sisters changed places, and my efforts were transferred from high finance to handwriting, called (whimsically) by Miss Glory, Penmanship. Miss Salvation distributed dirty dog-eared copy books. I was set to work on the last page, the Z page, of an otherwise completed and wholly filthy book, to reproduce fourteen times in zealous copper-plate: "Zeal of Thy House hath eaten me up." Meanwhile Miss Salvation transferred to us her godly bawling as to the way we should, or chiefly, shouldn't go: interlarding this with fragments of more specialized holy information, which being entirely useless I have never forgotten; e. g., which was the longest verse in the Word of God, and which was the shortest; the number of books in the Old Testament, and in the New; that "straightway" was the private and particular word of St. Mark, while "That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet" was the chosen cliché of St. Matthew.
Miss Glory took turn with us again for the third lesson: Reading. Our book was of course The Book. One mouldy old Bible was passed round, and we read in turn from its brown-spotted and damp-smelling pages. I think it was my first or second day that it fell to my turn to read from the eighteenth chapter of the Book of Genesis, where the Lord appeared unto Abraham in the plains of Mamre, and Abraham said unto the Lord concerning the destruction of Sodom, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? I knew the passage well, and read with relish and excitement the diminuendo Peradventures.
"Good, my child, good. Your readin' is a credit to your dear Grannie and your dear Great-Aunt. You read it fine, as to the manner born."
For the first time in my life the enchanting incense of praise filled my nostrils. I flushed, and while others read of Lot at the gate of Sodom and what-not else, I ceased to listen. My heart was beating to this refrain: You read it fine—as to the manner born. So I was good for something, for all Aunt Jael's daily blows and curses, my Grandmother's nightly She-is-weak-Lord-and-sinful petitions. I read fine!
The first day Mrs. Cheese called for me; but afterwards I was entrusted to Marcus Browning as escort. He was two years older: "a good child, not like some I could name" (Aunt Jael), "Born of Saints" (Grandmother), and possessed of the more fleshly merit of also living on the Lawn. We spoke little together.
The event I remember best of my first days at the Elementary Educational Establishment was a fight. Susan Durgles was for ever making fun of poor little Seth Baker's affliction. One day when Miss Glory and Miss Salvation were both out of the room Susan went a little too far.
"Look to 'im, look to 'im!" she mocked. "He looks like wan o' thase yer weather-cocks what wag and wobble about on the church steeple. Goes like this, do he? Ha, ha. Can't help hisself, can't he, palaverin' li'l wretch?" She flapped her hands in Seth's walrus way, and nodded her head convulsively in mocking imitation of poor little St. Vitus.
He was a meek child, but this time he could stand it no longer. "Dirty cobbler's lass!" he cried, and banged Susan full in the face with his small clenched fist. A regular fight began. My sympathies were wholly pro-Seth. Was not Susan the sneerer, the tormenter, the tyrant, the Aunt Jael, and Seth the harried one, the oppressed one, the victim, the me?